


all the windows are shattered (when the apocalypse comes)

by chatona



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/M, Off-screen Character Death, Rule 63, always-a-girl-chuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 11:49:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1132302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chatona/pseuds/chatona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you can’t fight them off, save the last bullet to yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the windows are shattered (when the apocalypse comes)

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'd. i have a thing for 63!chuck, what can i say?

One of them has been shuffling outside the house they’re holed up in for hours. The door locks, though, and it (Raleigh has stopped thinking of them as people, or at least he’s _tried_ , he’s trying) has yet to pass by the window where Raleigh waits to pick it off with the gun.

They’ve slept in turns. This house is better than most; there’s still running water. Raleigh has half a mind to make it their base for a few days. It’s got a bed, running water, some food, and locks on the doors. It’s luxurious by anyone’s standards.

Chuck’s just finished braiding her hair, weapon on the table next to her. She wears is in a French braid, end tucked under, so that there is nothing to grab. It takes a minute to braid. Raleigh doesn’t know why she doesn’t just cut it all off, but he’s glad. There’s a glint in her eyes that distracts him from keeping watch out the window; she’s opening her mouth to say something —

They both start when something hits the door, hard: a body. The lone shuffler is no longer alone. 

Christ, Raleigh hates them.

Chuck’s taken a step away from the door, but it only takes a second for her mind to catch up with her body and then she gets a stubborn look on her face, reaching for her weapon without taking her eyes off the door. Raleigh doesn’t know when he admires her more: when she runs towards danger unthinkingly, or when she’s afraid and turns to fight regardless.

**

It’s just the two of them.

They used to be a much larger group, but one by one people had died — actually died, if they were lucky, or turned if they weren’t. Used to be, Stacker Pentecost led their group and kept them in line. 

Pentecost had died because of cancer. It seems so ironic, so _normal_ and at the same time, that had been the beginning of the end. 

Mako Mori and Herc Hansen were the last to die; they’d gone on a supply run and never come back. Raleigh hopes they’re really dead and not something else. If they’ve been turned, he hopes they never see them.

He would do anything to spare Chuck the pain of having to kill a monster wearing her father’s face.

**

Raleigh still wakes up with screams lodged in his throat and Yancy’s face burnt into his brain.

He shot his brother, only it wasn’t his brother anymore.

**

The door breaks after the third body throws itself at it, flying off the hinges. Raleigh and Chuck are ready.

Between the two of them, they own: three guns, one rifle, ammo for two of the guns, five knives, an old bike they’d found in a shed, a lighter, two cans of gas and a few cans of stew.

It isn’t really difficult, killing them. They’re not particularly smart and not particularly fast and while shooting them anywhere but the head only slows them down, Chuck particularly is really fucking good with a gun.

(She’s a sight to behold.)

There’s five of them. Chuck downs the first two with precise head shots and Raleigh gets the third in the head with the second bullet, the first buried in its shoulder. They each kill one more.

“We have to get out of here.” It’s a truth they both know, but Raleigh still looks mournful when he nods. “Yeah.”

They have to stay ahead of them. A few of them aren’t difficult to kill. It’s when you’re faced with dozens that the trouble starts.

**

At some point, there won’t be any place for them to run to, anymore.

At some point, it won’t be possible to stay ahead anymore because they will be everywhere.

**

They fuck for the first time somewhere in Colorado, three weeks after her father and Mako die. It’s hard and fast and desperate and she’s urging him on the entire time, _c’mon, c’mon, harder, fuck, put some effort into it, will you,_ Rah _leigh_.

There is no room for gentleness between them. He’s not sure whether she thinks she doesn’t deserve it or whether she really doesn’t want it. He’s not sure he’s capable of it, anyway.

There’s no room for gentleness, but that night they sleep with their legs tangled together.

**

Max gets eaten and Raleigh sees Chuck cry for the first time. She screams at nothing and he tells her he’s sorry and she screams at him and eventually she stops and cries instead.

It’s not the worst thing he’s seen by far. It still breaks his heart.

**

Chuck’s angry and driven. She hates that they have to keep moving, that they can’t just make a stand and take them on. She’d gotten into plenty of fights with her old man and Pentecost over it and there are days Raleigh worries she’ll bring it up again. He’s not sure he’d say no. It would be a stupid thing to do, heroic and _dumb_ , suicidal.

She hasn’t suggested it yet.

Raleigh finds himself astonished time and again by her drive. She keeps going and it’s like she clings so hard to life even though it’s shit, but she’s stubborn in the face of it.

(Raleigh would have blown his own brains out by now, if he were alone.)

**

He doesn’t know her story. There are some things neither of them talk about. He hasn’t told her about Yancy. He overheard a screaming match between Herc and her once, _you weren’t there_ and _maybe if you had been, she wouldn’t have had to die_ , but he doesn’t know who _she_ is.

He never asks.

**

There are good days: when they get ahead far enough, when they end up in the middle of nowhere with sight lines that are miles long, when they find a cabin or an abandoned motel and sleep in actual bed, or by a fire that burns brightly.

Those days, they risk sleeping at the same time and Raleigh pulls her into his arms and holds on because he needs the contact and the reminder that they’re both alive. He’s not sure what Chuck gets out of it when she presses herself back against him, but he imagines it must be something along those lines, too.

There are moments in which Raleigh thinks it’s just like a road trip. There’s him and his girl on the back of a bike. The small assortment of weapons they carry with them, the tightness of Chuck’s grip on him, the desperation at the back of his mind — those things ruin the illusion, but there are moments in which he can pretend.

**

They don’t meet any other survivors. Raleigh doesn’t know whether to be sad about that.

**

He catches the flu and watches her grow more and more irritable while trying to nurse him back to health. When he starts to cough so much he can no longer crack jokes about her poor bedside manners, she tells him she’s taking the bike. There was a pharmacy a couple hours down the road, back the way they’d come.

They argue, but in the end he can’t keep her from going. She leaves him with most of their weapons, all within easy reach.

(If you can’t fight them off, save the last bullet to yourself.)

For ten long hours, Raleigh tries to stay awake. It shouldn’t be taking her this long.

She comes back, dirty and triumphant, painkillers and cold medicine and a fully stocked first aid kit under one arm. That night, she climbs into the bed with him and while she refuses to kiss him as long as he’s sick, she lets him hold her all night.

Maybe she’d been scared, too.

**

It’s the end of the world. They keep moving. 


End file.
